UK chip startup Fractile has raised $720 million in a Series C funding round, valuing the company at $7 billion.

The round was led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed, and Redpoint, with new investors Dragoneer, DST Global, BlackRock, T. Rowe Price, and CapitalG joining the round, alongside returning investors Accel, Conviction, and Felicis.

The UK government’s Sovereign AI venture fund and the British Business Bank also both participated in the round, but did not disclose the size of their investment. Their backing comes nine months after the startup announced plans to invest £100 million ($135m) to bolster its UK operations over the next three years, with the expansion set to include the growth of its existing sites in London and Bristol, and the creation of a new hardware engineering facility in the latter city.

Fractile was founded in 2022 by Dr. Walter Goodwin, a then PhD student at the University of Oxford’s Robotics Institute. The company is developing chips that use in-memory compute, an approach that allows processors to run calculations directly in computer memory.

Speaking to DCD in 2024, Goodwin said that by taking this approach, Fractile hopes to create hardware that reduces power consumption and improves performance, all while allowing for faster and less expensive inference at scale.

“I have been so lucky to get to build and lead an extraordinary team at Fractile, who span the breadth of what is needed to pursue this mission, from silicon to software to systems,” said Goodwin in a post on LinkedIn.

“While we’ve already scored some key breakthroughs – like our work to extract 20x higher speeds from DRAM memory, which is key to running models much faster than today’s chips can – we have very big ambitions, and there is still a lot of work ahead. This support will see us ship our first chips and systems next year. “